Between late nineteenth and late twentieth centuries various forms of local institutional arrangements have succeeded one another in Buenos Aires. These local arrangements are seen here as the construction of a government relationship between public authorities and the people, whose frame of reference is not the city as a whole, but its constituent parts, such as zones or districts (barrios). By looking at various historical moments the federalization of the city, the first decades of the twentieth century, Peronism, the years of its proscription and the democratic era inaugurated in 1983 we seek to interpret the continuities and ruptures of the ways in which this relationship was structured. Our aim is to add to the understanding of the various forms in which closeness and distance, both territorial and symbolic, were established between public authorities and the inhabitants of the city.